We went to nearby
Cefalu in part because I am a decrepit septuagenerian now and had neglected to pack the £4 fluorescent
trunks I’d bought at the Primark in Brighton during my birthday excursion two
weeks before. The hotel gift shop had a rackful of half-price (12€) trunks, but they were
all XXXL, and I’m still reasonably svelte. For even less money, there were the sort
of bikini bottoms Dame Zelda tells me Brits call budgie-smugglers (and which I decided to call bungee-jumpers), and in which
no boy from Playa del Rey, California, would ever be caught dead. I wound up paying
15€ for ghastly 120 percent polyester Chinese-made swimming trunks.
Emerging from the shop, we were nearly swept away by a huge wave of students, whose placards I at first misread as advertising a Mafia recruitment
drive. I realised in the nick of time it was in fact a kiddies’ anti-Mafia
protest. I suspect the Mafia no longer cuts off and mails to the local
newspapers the heads of those who speak out against them.
 |
Top: Dame Zelda enjoys the red wine at
Mama Rosa's. Middle: Godfather-styled
souvenirs in a Cefalu shop window.
Bottom: The Children's Anti-Mafia
Crusade.
|
Forty-eight hours later,
we were driven up into the mountains south and east of Cefalu, to a town in the
clouds called San Mauro Castelverde, from which
the 1930s opera singer Santa Biondo, of whom you have surely heard, immigrated to the United States as a child. Dame Zelda
noted that the locals who watched us suspiciously from the doors of their ominously
numerous butcher shops were unignorably inbred-looking. None played the banjo, though,
and the only toilet in town seemed to be in the pasticceria in which we were urged to spend money at the conclusion
of our walking tour. Failing to notice the pedal beneath the sink, Dame Zelda
was unable to wash her hands, and had to cleanse them with the little vial of posh pink Marks & Spencer hand sanitiser she carries with her for exactly such emergencies.
We proceeded down the mountain to
La Posada Ristorante, where we were to witness a cooking demonstration by the celebrated
(if only by the tour provider) local cook Mama Rosa, and then to enjoy a meal of
her creation. Grinning maniacally, her accordionist husband or brother-in-law played for us
as we got off the tour bus and trooped up to Mama’s, uh, test kitchen, across
the road from the actual restaurant. There we learned, for instance, that if one
wishes to fry an aubergine (that is, eggplant) in hot oil, it is necessary to
place the former in the latter, rather than leaving it on the counter in the
salted water in which it has been bathed (to reduce bitterness). Which is to
say that the monolingual Mama, in a scarily glossy black wig of the sort Gene
Simmons might wear on a dress-up occasion, didn’t exactly impart a wealth of
useful cooking tips. (Our guide kept ducking out for a smoke, and Mama seemed
to speak no English.)
She made a frittata with more ricotta than I’d ever seen
in one place, and I was reminded of how, on Saturday mornings in San Francisco
in the late 1980s, my daughter Brigitte and I used to giggle when, on television, Julia Child
would say, for instance, “We will now add a gallon of cream and a pound of
butter,” as we were unable to think of anything that wouldn’t taste pretty good
terrific drowned in cream and butter.
As we trooped dutifully back across
the road, the accordionist grinned rapturously and of course tore into "Arrividerci Roma". We were seated together on long
tables and served the worst red wine drunk anywhere in western Europe that
evening. It belonged on a salad — specifically, a salad that had offended you
in some way. We were served a succession of antipasti, of which I enjoyed only
the prickly pear. (Sicily abounds in cacti, to the point at which the jetlagged
American visitor might imagine himself in Arizona.) Godfather-themed souvenirs abound.
The carnivores in our touring
party got meat and potatoes as their main course. Dame Zelda and I got little
side salads instead. In fairness, the lettuce and tomatoes were fresh and
flavourful. At meal’s end, the accordionist, whom not a few of us had come to want to strangle, placed before us a
glass containing a paper serviette on which he’d inscribed TIPS. I found his
doing so obnoxious, and was tempted to tell him, “Buy low and sell high,” but I
don’t think he’d have…gotten it.
